Loved
by thedorkygirl
Summary: Companion to Biblical Transgressions Jacob wept over the body and prayed for the soul of the poor girl who could not help but be a sinner.
1. Kate

Loved

**Author**: Keren Ziv  
**Disclaimer**: Leave me be to my box and my clowns. I own all original characters.  
**Author's Note**: This is a prequel (1960s era) to my story Biblical Transgressions, though Lord knows that you could read this and never need to read that story at all. This was dangerously fun to write and that's saying something. I halfway dedicate this story to my mother, because I wouldn't have come up with Kate if I had never tried to imagine a more glorious life for her.  
**Rated**: Hard R. Violence, adult content. I allowed my _grandmother_ to read this  
**Archive**: If CM will take it ... sure. Everybody else, okay. Just tell me where.  
**Thank YOU**: To all of my beta's, specifically my twins (hee! yeah, baby!) and my namelys! There were SO many of you, and I had so many great suggestions. What to cut and what to add was very difficult ... and I feel like when I didn't take someone's advice (Brittany L! sorry!) that I was letting them down. You betas make it hard on us!

**Summary**: Companion to Biblical Transgressions "Jacob wept over the body and prayed for the soul of the poor girl who could not help but be a sinner."

* * *

**K**ate cried when she found out she was pregnant.

There was no one to offer her comfort. There were no husbands to rush to and share the news with. There wasn't even the act of sitting alone in the doctor's office, surrounded by people, the silence threatening to deafen her. None of that had been necessary since she just found out one day, between jobs, in the bathroom of the same dirty motel room she had been using for a week.

She sat on the edge of the toilet and cried, quietly, so that the man in the next room wouldn't wake up and wonder why the hell his whore was bawling like some rookie on her first job. Tremors raced through her body as she kept her sobs inside, bundled up, and tried to keep the tears restrained if not stopped. She didn't want this thing inside of her. She didn't **want **it, damnit.

She washed her eyes, carefully, and reapplied her make-up, deftly masking her face and herself with a few strokes. Trashing the kit she had bought at the corner store, she turned off the bathroom light. The dark yellow tiles looked tired in the darkness. She opened the door and walked out of the bathroom, careful to check that she didn't step on any of the clothing that had been tossed on the faded brown carpet.

Standing over the unmade bed, she surveyed the sight coolly. The alarm clock, with its round face, ticked contentedly from its perch on the bedside table. Sprawled over the top of the sheets was the body of a middle-aged balding man. His back had lots of hair on it, in dark curls. It disturbed her, seeing the curls.

Quickly, she walked over to him, her steps thundering only in her ears. She touched him on his side, gently. "Wake up," she whispered. He opened his eyes groggily, then smiled up at her with what she assumed was a seductive smile for him. He patted the bed next to him and murmured something incoherent. "Not unless you have some more dough. Otherwise I can't. I'd love too, but a girl's gotta make a living." Actually, no, she wouldn't love to. He smelled like pickles and bananas and a million other bad things all pushed into one package. She tossed him his pants and looked at him expectantly, her eyebrow cocked.

His response was to reach into his pants, retrieve his wallet, and then press two twenties between her cleavage. She took the bills and placed them in the Gideon's book as the customer untied her panties and slipped them to the floor. He reached up impatiently and yanked off her top, causing some of the seams to rip. It didn't matter to Kate. She could fix it. She slid down on the bed, next to him, and gazed at him underneath her eyelashes.

He wasted no time, guiding her hands down to his cock, observing as she slid her fingers around it. Kate watched him as he watched her, fascinated with how coarse he made it all. He soon closed his eyes and told her in a hoarse whisper, "Stop." He reached out and grabbed one of the condoms on the dresser, opening it swiftly. Slowly, Kate rolled it on, pretending to giggle, pretending to care.

Suddenly they were a tangle of sheets and elbows as he launched himself on her, his weight knocking the breath out of her, and was kissing and petting her in all the wrong places and telling her how beautiful she was and how damn sexy and how he wanted to just screw her until she bled and oh, it had better be soon because he was losing it and suddenly they were joined together, her legs around his hips.

Forward. Backwards. While her hips worked and he murmured her name from somewhere around her breasts, she thought insanely about her baby. Was this hurting her baby? She went faster, harder, and prayed for it to hurt the baby. He grabbed Kate's breast in one hand and squeezed it, his nails digging into the flesh, her nipple pressed painfully into his palm.

"You so good," she said automatically, falling easily into the slang of her customers. She gasped when he bit down hard on her breast. "God," she said. That had hurt. She tightened her legs around him, almost viciously, and he sighed in delight. He hadn't come yet, and was trying to stimulate her to stimulate him. There were always these types wherever you picked them up. She clenched and unclenched her vaginal muscles, all the while murmuring his name. "Alfred . . ."

"Miss Kitty," he called out. Then he was done and he rolled off of her and took off the condom and threw it in the trash and she was left on the bed, feeling slightly out of breath, but not at all surprised. She watched with a bored air from atop the comforter as he dressed himself. He looked frantically for his pants and wallet before finding them on the television where he'd tossed them.

When he left, still zipping up his pants and telling her she was a great piece of ass, here's a fiver as a tip, she cried again.

**S**he made arrangements. There are tricks to every trade. For Kate, it was as simple as making a few discreet inquiries from some of the girls and getting a few numbers slipped in her bag. She dialed the number one rainy day, stamping her feet and rubbing her hands in the phone booth, trying to get warm. The way the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder hurt, but she didn't have enough warm hands.

As she dialed the number, the rain came down steadily, soothingly. It blurred the colors of the cars racing past on the road and distorted the faces of the children playing in the wet. Kate didn't need that reminder, so she faced away from them, drawing her free arm around her waist and cradling the phone in between her cheek and shoulder.

The man on the other end of the line didn't speak very good English. Kate thought wildly of one of her first customers. He had been a Middle Eastern man, with a heavy accent. He had drawn hearts on her stomach and told her she was pretty. The man on the phone was Hispanic, probably from Puerto Rico with his accent. When he asked her name, she didn't give him her street name.

"Look," Kandy had told her earlier, "the best way to get the Bastard on your ass " Kandy jerked her head towards their pimp, who did go by the pseudonym of the Bastard, "is to let him know you're loaded. You don't want him beatin' the kid out of you. Just give your real name. Nobody thinks you use 'em. Betcha half the guys on this block don't even remember their girls' real names."

So Kate said her given name into the phone in smooth, even tones, a way she hadn't used for so long (months upon months, now that she thought of it) that her own voice sounded hoarse to her. "Mary Katherine O'Brien."

"One moment, please," he said. "Repeat that, please."

Please. Please. Please.

She repeated her name.

"Irish?" came the mild chuckle, another voice. This voice was deep with a southern accent. The phone had switched hands? "You've got the name and the accent. That's neat." He was obviously trying to make small talk with her, trying to calm her down. Kate breathed in deeply and cursed her Irish parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as far back as she could travel on her father's side. Living at home with Irish-born parents had given her the slightest bit of an accent that even being born and raised in the Midwest couldn't cure.

"I want to make an appointment." Her voice was strange to her own ears, strained almost. It sounded like a man with his wife's hands around his neck trying to scream but failing splendidly raspy, uncertain at what was happening, but forceful. He had to scream, and Kate had to do this.

"I'll transfer you to the Jesús, Mary, so we can make sure that you are certain you know what you're doing." Kate didn't correct him on her name.

"Hello?" The voice was thick, soothing, like the Irish priests of her childhood, and Kate allowed his words to drift slowly though the haze of confusion in her brain. She hadn't seen a priest since she was seventeen and had run away from home with Eddie and dreams of marriage and fame on television shows, where the men would swoon at her and the girls would hate her with envy and Eddie would kiss her at night, whisper Katie, and touch her and, oh, it would be so nice and feel so good and be so right. But then Eddie had gone to prison and she had gone to the funeral of the boy who had put him there before she'd realized she'd been left alone with no way to support herself, a girl from rural Idaho only halfway to LA. Kate didn't dream any more.

"I just want to make an appointment, please," Kate repeated, rubbing her index finger and thumb together in an oddly soothing motion. From the phone she could hear the man speak about the dangers of the abortion. He spoke for a length on the feelings that a woman went through after having an abortion. For quite some while, he elaborated on different options that a person could take instead of having an abortion. It almost sounded as if they didn't want her to visit the clinic. Kate closed her mind to their words and just waited. There was nothing to do in her life but to wait. Wait for customers to come to you, wait for them to come, and then wait for them to leave.

Kate interrupted him. "Look, what time should I come?"

There were the smallest of moments passing on the other end and she found herself listening to the muffled sounds of people talking back and forth over the receiver in hushed whispers. So she had taken them by surprise, apparently. Maybe they were used to more emotions. Kate had wasted all of her tears when she found out, and with the tears she lost the ability to care. At the moment, she just wanted to get it over with so it wouldn't be looming over her head, a storm-cloud willing itself only with desire to burst.

"Yeah," they told her finally, the southerner speaking. He told her the address and the time. Kate hung the phone in its cradle and stepped out of the booth. The wind was back and hit her hair, swirling it around her face, getting into her mouth so that she had to raise her hand to her lips and hook her finger, capturing the thin strands that danced in and out.

A man stepped up to her, dressed in jeans and a dark black shirt with the words LIVE LONG AND LOSE FRIENDS in bright neon yellow writing splashed across it. Kate smiled apologetically when he touched her arm. "Sorry," Kate said, "I'm not working."

He looked at her, bewildered. "I was just asking for the time," he replied after the briefest of pauses. Kate pushed up the sleeves to her coat to reveal her bare wrists. The man shrugged half-heartedly when he saw this. He held out his hand. "I'm Father Andrew."

Kate blushed. "I'm sorry, Father," she stammered. "I didn't mean to . . ." she floundered for a few more seconds before stopping. "I've got to go," Kate told him. "It's late, is all I know. It's late, Father. Too late." She wasn't speaking to him anymore, and time was the last thing on her mind.

"It's never too late."

She rushed off, scared he could see her soul, the child growing in her, the men she had screwed, the scars on her as if they were physical. She ran to the street corner and beyond and didn't stop until she was out of breath and gasping. She wasn't in life to win, she told herself. She was in life to finish it.

That night she dreamed of high school dances and first kisses.

**K**ate didn't remember where she got it, she just remembered that she sat in her car for twenty minutes, smoking it, trying to remember if it was marijuana that had been known to cause miscarriages. Kate remembered, almost completely done with her smoke, that it had only been shown to lower birth rates. She flicked the butt away, disgusted. At least it had calmed her down. She didn't have to go in there and think about what they were doing. She could go in there now and not remember why she didn't want to be there, why she was hating herself.

She got out of the car, happy that she was moving. The ground was a little rockier than what Kate would have normally liked, but she attributed it to the heels she was wearing. Nothing like dressing to impress when going to an abortion clinic. She was just getting over a few pebbles without tripping in her impossibly high shoes when she realized there was someone standing in front of her. That realization caused her to slip on a Twinkie wrapper she hadn't previously noticed. She ended up landing face first on the sneakers of the person. They were very dirty Adidas superstars. It made Kate sad, for some reason, to see them.

She looked up to see two knees just below a white pleated skirt. She labored to her feet and stepped back, looking at the owner of the knees in full. It looked to be a chubby little redhead wearing a tennis outfit and carrying a tennis racket made of gold . . . or maybe not gold. It was, at the very least, spray painted in gold. The girl grinned and dimples appeared.

"Who're you?" Kate asked, slightly wary of this stranger with the valuable racket. She watched, fascinated, as the girl swung her racket casually around, much as an ax-murderer in a B-movie horror flick might. Kate stepped back when the gold-carrying tennis dressed girl stepped forward.

"God," the girl said simply. Kate looked at her and shrugged. It fit. And God was a southerner, if Kate could read the slight accent She had. The Baptists really did have a ticket to Heaven. Kate again cursed being Irish and Catholic. She was never going to make it. Perhaps there was a sort of test they gave you that would let you in, like a GED. Not that Kate had hers.

"What can I get you?" Kate asked God. God only smiled, deepening the dimples. Kate wondered if God would mind it if she reached over and stole one of the dimples. They looked like they were stealable. Of course, if they weren't, God might get mad that she had tried.

"You're pregnant," God said, not answering her question. Kate didn't dignify this with a response; God was able to see into her mind, after all. God was far more stupid than Kate had always figured Hr to be. In fact, Kate had always seen God painted in a more masculine light. "You're going to give birth to a boy."

No, she wasn't. It wasn't going to be born. "No," Kate said. "I'm fixing it." Fixing her life. If Kate amended this wrong thing, maybe she would win at something; maybe she would be able to walk down the street and not accuse the priests of hitting on her; maybe she would get pregnant and cry for joy instead of fright and an overwhelming sadness, with someone with her instead of alone.

"I will love him so much," God said, almost to Herself. "I will watch him and he will be so beautiful. And when it is time for you to name him, you will have already done so. Even now I am whispering to your fingers the pages to turn, to find the name that is right for your son." She closed Her eyes and tears formed under the edges of Her lids. "While you've been doing what you've been doing for so long," God wondered slowly, "have you always remembered how much I love you?"

"Of course, God," Kate said quickly. "I have always loved you."

"I know. But you've got to remember that I love you, too." She turned to leave and Kate saw that the back of Her knee needed to be washed where God had apparently sat on a magic marker. It was green, and if it had been several shades darker, Kate would have mistaken it for a bruise. However, it was bright, almost neon, and obviously ink.

"Hey, God!" she said. God turned and looked expectantly. "Don't forget to scrub your legs when you take your bath tonight. You sat on something." God just continued looking. It was unnerving. Did God always give people the creeps, or was it just Kate? "You're welcome," she said.

God nodded once, but didn't move. After a minute of almost stationary behavior on both their parts, God began to rotate slowly on one foot; like a ballerina in a music box except She didn't have Her hands above Her head and She still looked rather frightening.

Kate had to tell Her. "God " Kate called out, scared. "I . . . I was lying." God would damn her to hell and her bastard child with her, Kate was sure, and so she squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the flames to begin.

"There's always a bit of truth behind the lies," God said kindly.

Kate felt something wet land on her eyelid. She shook her head, dispelling the drop. Kate opened her eye and looked around, suspicious. "What?" she asked, but God was already gone. Kate stared at the spot on the wall for a long while, trying to remember Her words. All she could recall, though, was that she was going to have a baby loved by God. God would love her son.

She turned and walked as it began to rain. From somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she was in no condition to drive, what with having been visited by the Holy Spirit of the Lord God on Earth. But she didn't want to leave the car on the street and come back and find it missing. In fact, she wasn't quite sure where the car was now. She stopped and looked around frantically. Had someone taken it while Kate was speaking to God? How dare they? Why, she ought to ... oh, there it was.

She got in the car and started the ignition, carefully breathing through her nose so she wouldn't inhale any of the fumes left in the car. She wasn't stupid enough to drive high; but she figured that God knew Kate had to get home and would take the drugs right out of her system. She just didn't want to put them right back in. As she stopped at a red light, she murmured to herself, "I didn't inhale ..." For some reason, this struck her as funny and she giggled.

The motel pool was dirtier than Kate remembered it being. The water was scummy and obviously in need of service. She stared at it a long while, pensive. Kate didn't need to think, she didn't need to breathe, she supposed. After hours or years, she couldn't tell, Kate got up off the concrete and made her way to her room. She nodded once to Kandy, standing on the top of the stairs smoking a cigarette, who gave Kate a sympathetic look, and then closed the door quietly.

The Gideon's bible was in the drawer. Kate thumbed through it absently, looking for the forty dollars she'd put in there the other night. She couldn't find it and she swore. If she hadn't already retrieved it, which, come to think of it, was a possibility, then the maid had taken it. She wouldn't put it past the maid to take it. Kate pictured her, riffling through the book, finding the twenties, and shoving them in the pocket of her stained white apron.

Kate let the book fall open on the bed as she got up to wash her hands. She glanced down and saw Andrew Jackson's face looking defiantly up at her from the yellowing paper and noticed how his face was twisted in a cruel smirk. She snatched the twenties up and crumpled them angrily in her fist, her fingers taking the roughness of the paper against them as a sort of affront to their own lotioned feel. Kate sat on the bed and looked at the page with unexplainable tears in her eyes.

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the passage that glared boldly up at her from below. Romans 9:13: Jacob I Have Loved; Esau I Have Hated. It struck a chord. Hadn't God said something about love? Oh, yes, God loved her son. Jacob I Have Loved ... This was what God meant when She told Kate that she would know her son's name. Kate dropped the balled bill and reached down to smooth the words, noticing the difference in the thin parchment against that of the bank notes. She would remember God's love; she would remember it for all her life.

And her reminder would be her son, Jacob.

* * *

**H**e was beautiful. His eyes were gorgeous; Kate knew that, more than likely, the pigmentation would settle in his eyes in a year or less and they could be the dazzling blue they were now or a soulful brown or somewhere between the two. She didn't care. He was absolutely perfect, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and hair already covering his small head and, God, was that another contraction? Kate breathed deeply and glanced hurriedly at the nurse standing to her right with an ambiguous smile on her face.

Jacob started fussing, moving back and forth with such strength that Kate was surprised, and the nurse came rushing over. Jacob's body pushed against her and his little limbs flailed, and then they became very still, stiff. She screamed in fear and from the pain that had just washed over her and called out her son's name as the nurse walked briskly to a gang of other nurses waiting next to an infant's bed two steps away from her own. Kate would have followed through with his care, she really would have, if it hadn't have been for the second wave of pain that had suddenly hit her. She gave a low moan.

"Jacob," she said, and they moved the bed closer to her so that she could see him, his face red from his squawking.

"Looks like there's going to be another one," came the voice of the doctor from somewhere between her knees. Kate really didn't want to believe him, but he was gazing down inside her and ought to know. A moment of panic swept over her and she wanted to scream out, No, no, this isn't right, she was going to give birth to a son, not a son and another, and her son, her only son, her first son, her true son, that son would be loved by God, the God who played tennis and was a Baptist. She closed her eyes and moaned.

Sometime during the next hour, Jacob was taken from her. She wasn't entirely aware of it, couldn't be certain that she hadn't hit the baby bed he was in with her fists. She just came to realize that the doctor was tying the umbilical cord and she wasn't near Jacob. Kate tried asking for him, tried calling for him, but her voice was hoarse from screams and cries that she didn't fully remember making and she found she couldn't. There was mingled in the air the soft voice of the nurse and the indignant screeches of the new one. Suddenly there was a disturbance and Kate knew something more was wrong with her son. She knew.

"Jacob," she said. As the second one was handed off to Kate by a harried nurse before she rushed across the room, she heard the harsh medical terms being tossed back and forth, none of it sinking into the fog that exhaustion brought with her. She strained to look across the room at her son, prayed to God to keep Her loved one safe. "Jacob," Kate cried insistently. Oh, what was wrong with him?

A doctor shifted; she could see her son, lying on the table, his small body white and blue and red with anger. He was also still. Very still. The sunlight streamed through the window and hit her oldest baby in heavy tones; the commotion stopped and she saw surreptitious glances in her direction. Kate inhaled, the smell of blood and afterbirth strong in the air. On her chest, the second one squirmed and she looked at it, the red face, the weary look it already possessed. A small hand waved at her and she wrenched her gaze back to her first, where the doctor and two nurses were still standing. Kate tried to make eye-contact with the first smiling nurse, but there were averted eyes.

"What's wrong?" Why weren't they working on him? Was he sleeping? Oh, it had only been twenty minutes and she was paying them money, had paid them up front, had moved to this small town to be away from the drugs and the men and the boys pretending to be men to raise her son and she wasn't a bad girl so why did it look like they were punishing her suddenly?

"I'm very sorry ... " The voice was that of the doctor. Kate stared at him, shocked. "We tried all that we could do " No they hadn't. But Kate knew they understood how she had that baby, that precious baby. "but we couldn't save him. I am so very sorry for your loss of ..." he paused almost casually and a nurse supplied the name of the baby quickly. "... Jacob. But you have another son."

So it was a boy. Just like Jacob. Only not like Jacob. He could never be her son, her perfect son, the one that God had told Kate that She would love.

"He got a name?"

She looked down at him, his mouth twisted in an unattractive frown as he slept fitfully in her arms, his eyes scrunched tightly closed. She considered telling the Bastard that the child was his when she went back home, for of course she was returning now that she didn't have to worry about Jacob's welfare. "Esau," Kate told them. "His name is Esau."

And Kate hated God for loving Jacob so much that She could not bear to stay parted from him.

**

* * *

**

**H**e was painfully thin. His eyes sunk deeply into his face and his lips were two lines stretched dangerously tight across faded brown skin. He had no eyebrows. This struck Kate as oddly calming as she surveyed him. He was sick. Cancer, chemotherapy treatments? Losing battle to AIDS? Kate found that she didn't care anymore.

She slipped the shirt she'd been unbuttoning off of his bony shoulders and carefully traced the ribs on his stomach, inwardly questioning how they would poke and prod her skin when he inevitably crushed his body to hers in a desperate try to place familiarity to the mechanical, impersonal act of sex. Kate understood, she really did; they wanted to pretend they were in love with her for at least the time building up to and the duration of their orgasm. After that it was anyone's guess as to whether or not he'd hit her up for a freebie or graduate to a more physical form of hitting when she refused.

Kate was already undressed. She could tell from his mannerisms that he'd never done this before, never bought: the quick glances around the already dimmed room, towards the windows, at the silent television. She wasn't certain whether she was dealing with someone who had lost his life or who was desperately searching for meaning in what he had left. People attributed too much emotion to sex, she realized, and it would break them down.

His skin felt like there should be more to it. It felt like it would break if she applied just a little more pressure to it, or if she used her nails on his back like some men liked to have done to them as proof later on in the locker rooms that they were actually having sex, and violent sex at that. They were so good they drove her to blood.

Once they started, he had a rhythm to him that she didn't expect. He was in unfamiliar territory, yes, but he knew what the game was, and now that they had moved past the preliminaries, he could take the reins for a bit. He managed to massage the curve of her breasts while subtly positioning her legs over his hips and drawing her closer to him. She smiled at his naivety: foreplay was for lubrication, but it had been a long time since Kate had found a man who remembered that. She kissed his thin collarbones and hoped he had AIDS.

The door swung open and a small figure was silhouetted in the light from the hall. The customer jerked his head up from where he had been watching their bodies merge, then pulled back when he realized there was a child in the doorway. Kate moved off of him and sighed, loudly, and tried to keep her voice amused. She wrapped a blanket around herself and walked over to the child.

"Are you looking for your mommy?" she crooned. The boy nodded as she steered him outside. Shutting the door, Kate hissed, "Esau, what have I told you? You've got to stay in Aunt Kay's room when I'm busy. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times you want to be feed, you've got to make some sacrifices. That means, stay away from me when I'm busy!" His bottom lip trembled. "I'm sorry," she added more kindly, "but you must go to Aunt Kay's."

She turned then, but not so quickly as to miss seeing the tears welling up in his eyes. She ignored them and waltzed back into the motel room, purposely locking the door after she had closed it behind her. The customer was waiting on the bed, watching her with his lost eyes only half interested, too far gone to care after the first shock of adrenaline had worn off, and she was terribly glad that he hadn't left. It was true, Kate needed the money from this job to go shopping.

"Kandy's kid," she said, as she slipped onto him. "He's always looking for her."

The customer said nothing, just tried to work their bodies into the dance that he had initiated a while beforehand. He no longer touched her breasts with his soft fingers, but he kept his eyes on Kate's, and laced his fingers with hers. Kate found herself holding his hand back. She pulled him in deeper, saddened. She wasn't wet enough and the friction hurt. Kate hadn't prepared herself because of his soft touches. Surrounded by her thoughts, Kate only vaguely heard the voice coming through the thin door.

"Mama ... Mama ..." the voice bleated out piteously.

Kate closed her ears and stared intently into the dully bright eyes of her customer, murmuring words of endearment that he couldn't hear but could see plainly on her daringly red lips, lips that left scarlet stains on his body where they connected. The room around her pulsed with her heart, beat with each movement her hips made. She arched her back,; blocked out the sobs coming through the door, debated reaching down and touching herself. His eyes were steadily darkening. They were the color of her dreams, the color everything took when she couldn't breathe and she just needed to relieve stress and there were these splendid blades to help do the job. Up the arms, a bit of worry let out in red streaks, and it only left a little mark for every time. God, was he still crying?

"Mama ..."

She reached down and found the spot. As he came, Kate tried to pretend it was her, and began to cry.

* * *

**"M**ama?"

Kate looked down at the boy running dirty fingers along the lace edges of the teddy she was mending. He looked back up at her unconcerned and, with his free hand, scratched his chin. She inwardly sighed and snatched the outfit out his hands, scolding him for sullying the fabric after she had washed it and after she had told him not to touch her things.

"Mama, why don't you love me?"

It was such a simple question. Children were always terribly blunt, Kate reflected as she tried to find the best way to phrase her answer. There were so many things to say, but they were all so difficult to actually put into words. She wasn't verbally inclined at any rate. When she was a child, she had had a soft way of speaking, mostly because she could never find the words to express herself. Now that she'd been living away in a ghetto for so long that she couldn't remember not speaking with the easy rhythm of the streets.

What to tell him? That, perhaps, was the most important part. The story was so deeply intertwined within her soul that she could not help but see where the story and her life fit like two lovers, and where parts were awkwardly placed. It needed to go smoothly for Esau, though, so she inwardly rearranged a few, unimportant details for him.

"Because," she said carefully, "God hates you." She pulled out of the desk drawer the tired old Gideon's book that she'd saved since that first night she'd found Jacob's name. "Sit next to me," she instructed. As she read the passage aloud from the bible in her lap, Esau climbed on the bed and sat himself serenely next to her, his calm nature striking against her like a sort of whip.

"You had a twin, Esau," she told him. "A twin is a brother that is born on the same day as you. He was your older brother. He died, though, Esau. God loved him so much that She could not bear to be away from him. Sometimes I get very angry at God that She would take away Jacob, because he was so perfect and beautiful."

Unbidden, an image of Jacob as she had first seen him came to her mind. The little baby with the perfect eyes, of the infant blue that the babies had when they were first born. Kate remembered his tiny fingers waving in the air and his toothless smile as he gazed up at her. She shuddered slightly when she remembered the tiny body shaking, his short little fists flying in every direction.

"God told me that She would love him and that I would find his name. Well, I did, when I opened up this Gideon's. I saw this passage right here. I picked the name Jacob there, and I loved him. Then he died, and you came. You were a surprise. I named you after Jacob's brother, who steals what's rightfully Jacob's. Do you understand, Esau?"

Did he understand that he had taken Jacob's life and she had been left with Esau and nothing else?

Esau nodded and studied the page thoughtfully.


	2. Esau

Companion to Biblical Transgressions "Jacob wept over the body and prayed for the soul of the poor girl who could not help but be a sinner."

* * *

**T**he first time Esau entered a church he was awed by the windows. They were stained glass, colorful and yet dominantly red to him. The shapes were so geometrical, so simple, that he could not help but wish to reach out a hand to touch what he imagined would be a smooth and cool surface. Perhaps, he reasoned, if he leaned into the scene he could fall into it and become part of the glass, part of the beauty.

It was not just the stained glass that fascinated the twelve-year-old boy. The crucifix on the wall was gorgeous, a true symbol to the lie of faith that his mother kept. After his awe over the windows was over, he stood, hands to his side, staring longingly at the glorious interior of the tall, gothic building. Where the striking edifice had sprung from in the small city he had no idea, but the location was almost idyllic. It was as if he had wandered away from the pain and the dirt into this land where none of that existed.

He walked among the pews, conscious of the people around him smiling and himself smiling back. Esau had the feeling that these were truly good people: people of the sort one would wish to meet if waylaid by a flat tired when traveling a dark road. There were children there, sitting near the front, clothed nicely and hair brushed into braids or gelled into an uneasy truce between unruly and combed.

His jeans, clean but old, seemed to mold themselves into him. This was his lot, he rationalized. He would come and watch the beauty in old jeans while the others participated, became part of it, in their fancy clothing and clean faces, clean hearts. His own heart felt too leaden to be truly part of what he was seeing.

Esau heard someone moving slowly toward him, behind him. He wasn't certain how he knew that the even steps were directed at him, but he did, as surely as he knew that he had found a place to love. Without blinking, taking in all the wonder that he could, he slowly turned. Esau saw a man in long black robes and a smiling face looking at him. He smiled tentatively. They were priests, weren't they? In the robes? They would be fathers, then, if they were priests. He waited for the man to speak.

"Hello," the man in the black robes said. He held out a hand to be shaken and, much to Esau's surprise, the boy took it firmly in his own. "I'm Father Kendris. You're new here. I've not seen you visit our church before." He gave Esau a warm smile. "And what might your name be, hmm?"

Esau paused before replying. "Jacob."

"Well, Jacob, are you the only one of your family here? Or do I have a mother and a father to meet?"

He bit his lip hesitantly, then spoke boldly to the priest. "My dad died before I was born. My mom's been raising me by herself for a long time. She's ill, though, and I have nothing to do when she's in the hospital. I was wandering around the city when ... when I saw this place. I hope I'm not doing anything wrong."

The priest laid a kind hand on Esau's shoulder, and he wanted to cry for the unfairness of it all. Why had he never had this before? His emotions surged and his mouth tasted bitter with adrenaline. Tears overcame the barriers and slipped down his cheeks unchecked and unwanted. It was shameful, to cry in front of this stranger, and over such a silly matter.

"There, there," the priest said heavily. "It's okay. It'll be okay. I'll help you. Why don't you come and visit me every time your poor mother is in the hospital. You shall keep me company. Then we shall be able to talk. Are you Catholic?" Off of Esau's look, Father Kendris clarified, "This is Catholic church, though I welcome to all Christian faiths."

"Oh," Esau said, feeling foolish. "My ... my mother named me after the Jacob in the Bible. She said she had a vision that God would love me, and this was the first passage she opened up to. She sometimes says that, uh, it's quite Irish enough for her, thank you very much, and much better than what her parents stuck her with. She's Mary Katherine, you see." Esau was babbling, trying to fill in the gaps of lies with chunks of truth, trying to make the road traversable. "She had priests. I remember. She went to a school where there were priests."

"Catholic then," said Father Kendris, smiling. Was he Catholic, like the father assumed? Esau paused, then thought: Sure, why not? He smiled back genuinely. The father wasn't disbelieving him. Maybe, just maybe, Esau could be Jacob here, and could forget that he was Esau and that God hated him. Perhaps as Jacob he could learn to earn the love of his mother, and maybe even changed her ways.

Esau's dreams would never materialize, though, he realized. His mother was too much entangled in the life she was in to ever be fully cut away from the strings. Those same strings had strengthened over the years she had spent as the pleasurer of men.

"Aren't priests celibate?" Esau inquired suddenly. The priest nodded gravely. "Cool," he said sincerely.

Esau would come back at later dates, bringing school work and questions with him as offerings to the sage man of the cloth. Help was dispersed freely from all that he encountered and Esau began to truly feel that, as Jacob, he had eked out a place for himself, somewhere to belong and to own. There were always people there to speak to when he was lonely, and he began to spend more and more of his time in the simple yet awe-inspiring place.

"Is your mother in the hospital often, Jacob?" Father Kendris inquired one afternoon as Esau munched on an apple and tried to cross-multiply on his math homework. Esau didn't answer immediately, and Father Kendris repeated the question.

"Yes, sir," Esau said quietly. "She's very sick. Very, very sick." To himself he added, Her sins eat away at her soul and cause it to be more sickened than ever her body shall be.

"Who takes care of you?"

"My Aunt Kay. She takes care of me when she isn't busy. Otherwise, I stay in the apartment and do my homework. It gets very lonely there. Can't I come anymore?

"No, Jacob, it's okay. You may still come here. I was just worried that perhaps your mother, being so ill, hadn't found someone to make certain that you were fed properly and off to school. Is your Aunt Kay living with you, Jacob?"

"Well ... she lives next door, actually. Sometimes she comes to our apartment and sleeps on the couch if her heat gets turned off. She's kinda bad about remembering to pay bills and such. It isn't really her fault. I make certain that Mama pays the bills, though, so that we always have heat and gas to cook food. You know, because Mama is always so ... sick."

"I'm very sorry that a boy so young has such responsibilities as you do, Jacob. However, I am glad to see that you have embraced them and worked very hard to make certain that everything is working smoothly in your life. You are doing so well in your schoolwork, I can imagine that you will be able to go to any school that you wish to go to."

"I want to be a priest when I grow up, Father."

"It takes more than a child's whimsy to become a priest, Jacob. But I think you have the patience to wait to see if that is what you truly want."

Esau smiled.

At home that night, his mother met him with a slap and an angry scowl; she had arrived home early and discovered that he was not sleeping in bed. The slap was not rough, nor was it done unkindly, and Esau did not mind it. The scowl hurt him far more than any physical harm his mother might have thought to inflict.

"Where were you?" she inquired, her voice dangerously low. Was she drunk, then? She got angry and stupid when she was drunk.

"I was at church," Esau told her boldly, his voice quivering only slightly.

His mother looked at him searchingly for a few moments. Her gaze was penetrating and Esau felt as naked as the men who frequented his mother's bed at the motel she preferred. He shifted nervously on his feet, trying not to look into her eyes. They were not cruel eyes, but they were bad eyes all the same and he did not wish to tarnish himself with them.

"What sort of church?"

"With priests and nuns."

"Oh." A softer tone. She was not that drunk. "I went to those."

"I know." You don't anymore, he added. You don't because now your body and soul are vile and riddled with the marks of evil men.

She continued to stare at him. He grew uncomfortable under her scrutiny and excused himself to his homework. He could feel her eyes on his back as he walked, slowly, steadily, to the kitchen table, passing the sofa that folded out to accommodate him.

Three days later, she soiled the clean linen binding him to the church. It would be washed, carefully, but it would never be quite the same.

Esau worked quietly on his state history homework with Sister Jena. She was always quite helpful with history and English work, especially on the nights, like that night, when Father Kendris was not there. When that happened, Esau generally spoke with the other priests and with the nuns, finding out information about them.

Sister Jena, for example, had had a dog name Morphis who, whenever he sneezed, would fart quiet loudly but without terrible smell. Esau found small anecdotes like that amusing. He liked to listen about their childhoods, liked to mix them in with his own version of his childhood that he was creating in his head.

"When I was a child," Father Stuart always started, "I had to walk to school." Esau would nod. "Uphill."

"Oh, I agree with you, Father. Uphill, of course."

"In the snow."

"Without shoes?"

"Both ways."

"Both ways without shoes? That's shocking."

"You saucy boy! Both ways uphill."

"Did you enter and exit at different entrances to accomplish that feat?"

"We only had one entrance. It was a one-room school house."

"Did they seat the boys on one side and the girls on the other, Father?"

"Of course."

"Was your dog's name Rover?"

"And he waited outside the church for us every Sunday."

"Did your father have him buried by the gate to the church graveyard?"

"No, that was a character in the Anne of Green Gables series."

"Of course it was. My mistake. Where was the dog buried?"

"Under the apple tree where he used to play."

"I wouldn't eat any more of those apples if I were you. Don't you think it's creepy, eating the apples where your dog is buried?"

"I do now."

"I was just pointing out a fact."

"Don't you have some homework that Sister Anne can help you with?"

When he came home, quietly letting himself in the apartment that night, he noticed that his mother's bedroom door was closed and upon the doorknob a bright red bra was haphazardly thrown. It was an uncommon but not unheard of practice of his mother's: she had special customers whom she allowed into the privacy of her home, her bedroom, where she did business with them. Esau had grown accustomed to that, and he simply laid on the couch quietly on those nights, trying not to listen.

His mother came out disheveled, a robe barely covering enough of her body to be decent. He saw her through heavy lids, standing silhouetted in the hallway. She walked wordlessly to him, beckoning with her fingers. Esau climbed out of the covers, also silent, and walked toward her. She put a finger to her lips, turning.

She put a hand on the doorknob, colored in the dark like an aged photograph, inviting him in. With trepidation, Esau followed, his hands holding each other as tightly as possible. Shoving him roughly into the shadows amidst a pile of sweaty clothing, his mother went over to the man splayed across the bed like a puppet without the strings and tapped him on the shoulder.

"You've got to go," she said in a large, bold whisper. The man muttered incoherently and something startlingly white on the floor caught Esau's eye. He stared at it, his breath hitched in his throat. It could not be. He drew in air, his windpipe feeling the slash of it as it rattled down raggedly like a knife to the very flesh. "My boy, my boy will be getting up to use the bathroom. I don't want you in there when he's there."

The person on the bed begrudgingly moved up into the light, his naked body white as virgin snow, but Esau didn't edit his gaze, fascinated as he was by the piece of bright cloth on the floor. Slowly, like a tear making its way down a face, his hand inched forward while the man lurched and lumbered his way to the door and into the hall, his breath stinking of alcohol. He shut the door loudly behind him.

Esau's mother turned to him triumphantly. Esau clutched in his fingers the cloth, touching it in its stiffness, broken in spirit. He could hear the man losing water in the bathroom across the hall. Esau's mother opened the door, letting in the harsh yellow light, and he saw from his spot dark bundles of cloth, cloth that could be a robe thrown carelessly to the floor.

"This is a lesson for you, Esau. Nothing is perfect. Not even your precious priests."

The man stormed back into the room, Esau sank into the shadows, and the woman gave a mirthless laugh. After a moment, a soft snoring came from the bed.

"You saw him."

"No."

"Yes, you did."

"No."

"You saw him, Esau. Saw him in all his glory."

"No, I did not." Didn't see anything. Not a thing. Didn't see anything.

"Don't play dumb with me! I'm helping you! I'm trying to save you from thinking that if you go out and become some sort of religious nut that all will be right with the world. This man speaks for God, Esau, he speaks for Her, and ya know what? I just screwed his brains out. He was moaning my name and, gracious, did he invoke the Lord's name. You should have heard him. Maybe you came home too late. Let me tell you, though, Esau, he was real vocal."

"Shut up!" Please. It hurts.

"I'm saving you! I'm breaking the lies, Esau. I'm breaking the lies."

"You can't destroy this for me," he said vehemently. "You cannot ruin this purity I have."

"Do you know him?" Esau's mother asked.

He shook his head decisively, but the truth was that he had not looked at the man's face but rather at the clothing strewn out on the floor and night table. If he had looked, he would have seen something he did not want to see, could not stand to see, and it would have torn him from the very soul to his flesh until he was bleeding and weeping at once, a crumbled heap upon the floor of the room where his mother and his mentor had fucked.

Esau closed his eyes and refused to open them, walking blindly out the door of the apartment, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.

* * *

**K**ate carefully applied a thick layer of dark color that would stain skin wonderfully to her tired lips, frowning. Her hair was swept up off her neck in a high bun that she thought made her look beautiful and more approachable. Her clothing was simple enough, and needed no explanation to be given as to the occupation of the wearer.

Under her arms he knew that he'd see the marks. Faint red scars up your arm don't make you as pretty but more able than the younger ones out there with nothing but themselves.

Esau watched from the sink, his hands under the warm water as it ran from the metal above it. He frowned, waiting, while Kate stood up, went to the refrigerator, opened it, and stared forlornly into the brightly lit machine. Her back, tattooed with roses, rainbows, and crucifixes, glared at him from around the cloth covering it.

"You're a sinner," Esau finally remarked simply.

Kate laughed. Esau didn't understand where the joke was, and asked her to clarify her mirth. "My sins," Kate explained, "have kept you alive for sixteen years. If I didn't do what I do ... you wouldn't be fed, you wouldn't be clothed. You'd be living on the streets, probably the gopher for some pimp who's grooming you to be his boy-wonder. You're lucky I work to get the dough to take care of you."

Esau looked expectantly around their dank apartment. One bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and bath with no tub but a shower. There were seven windows in the house, four with drapes, two with blinds, and one in the kitchen that faced a brick wall. The couch in the living room folded out, completely taking up the room, so that Esau could sleep on it. His mother took the bedroom as her sanctuary. In it one could find odds and ends, pieces that she had picked up over the years to decorate the nine by ten foot space.

"I don't know anything else, Esau," Kate continued, trying to explain herself needlessly to her son. They both knew that he would never could never see her side. "That's why you're going to school and studying. You, you're becoming what me and Jake could never be."

Did she love him? Or was she truly trying to live out her life and Jacob's through Esau? Couldn't Kate see that he was too brimming with his own soul to take on the souls of his mother and his twin? He dropped the subject after she told him that, but only for a minute. He watched as Kate brought out a beer and sat down at the table with it. He walked the three steps it took to cross the kitchen and looked at her, frowning.

"You know when you drink you take the wrong sort to your room." His frown deepened when Kate took a large swig of beer.

"Michael left today," she said between her first and second drink, as if that explained everything. "He's acting single, and me? I'm left drinking double." Kate laughed, the sound clawing at the air desperately. She looked down at the table, at the cracks in the plastic table setting from where Esau had tried to snap it in half and hadn't succeeded. "I thought, hey, he knows what I do and he's trying to help me. But all he was looking for was a free piece of ass, you know?" Kate turned to Esau suddenly and cried savagely, "Don't you ever treat a woman like this, you hear? Don't you ever go with no hooker, Esau. You gonna be a gentleman if it kills you."

He turned from her, tears in his eyes, and didn't turn back until he heard the door to the apartment close. Before he was completely around, he heard his mother say through the wood, almost as if she was afraid of him hearing, "I never wanted to be a whore, Esau. It just sort of found me. But I wouldn't have had Jake otherwise." Her footsteps echoed in the stairway until she reached the bottom.

"I read the story," he whispered quietly to himself. "Jacob took away Esau's birthright. Jacob was not the first twin, not the twin that came to it all because he earned it. Jacob tricked his brother and stole it all away. Jacob's mother loved him, but Esau's father loved him. I am the second twin, Jacob, not Esau, but my mother doesn't love me as in the story. Who am I, really?"

It was a whirlwind of emotions that overtook him then, causing him to shake so badly that he nearly placed the knives aside to be washed once he had calmed down. There was a certain amount of inequality in life that made fair, for some people, seem an abstract thing. Esau knew he had never in his life witnessed a day pass by when his mother hadn't wished that he was Jacob.

He began to pray to God. Not the God that his mother had told him about, a woman-child wearing dirty sneakers. No, Esau prayed to the God that Father Kendris had introduced him to, the God that had inspired the beautiful images and stories of the Church. Esau prayed that the sins of his mother would be washed away from her, from the flesh that she gave nightly to others, and from the soul that she still clutched carefully to that tainted and tangible self.

Kate touched his shoulder softly and Esau turned, angry, startled, hurt. Where had she come from? He went to grab her, went to shake her, to ask her why, why, why? when he realized that his hand felt heavy, that his fist had something inside of it, and there was the sickening feel of wetness upon the pads of his fingers as he blindly groped the opening in his mother's chest, a small cut, really. There was a clatter and something fell to the floor like an anvil thudding to Earth.

Kate's hands flailed wildly, without sound, against his chest and Esau watched as they sullied his clean shirt with their scarlet imprints. Esau stared, shocked, and she brought her hands to her own chest and gasped, her eyes wide with fear. She opened her mouth to say something perhaps to berate him for hurting her, for doing such a thing but he gave her no time, gave the woman who sinned no chance to accuse. With an impulsive lunge, he had the knife in his hands and to her throat. Esau did not hesitate when he pulled back, slicing through flesh in a way that thrilled him to his very marrow. He pulled the knife out, tossed it to the floor, turned his mother to him.

She coughed once and something dark beaded at the corner of her mouth.

Kate fell back onto the cheap tiling, her impact making such a soft thud that Esau almost didn't notice it. He leaned over her, his eye as large as her own, and placed a hand on either side of her. It was the sound of flesh on flesh that caught his attention, not the pressure of her hands on his wrists, and he looked down for half a second at her grasp. Kate's gurgled breath was ragged, she was afraid.

"Don't be," he whispered softly, touching her hair, smoothing it.

The blood was pooling around her body now, gelatinous, like chocolate syrup. Her lips moved wordlessly, the thin red line coming from the corner of her mouth beading and continuing, stopping, and repeating. He grabbed a wash cloth and began working on the tiling around her. The rag turned the color of grapefruit, then ruby, then mahogany, as he swiped it through the life's liquid. Three times he rinsed it in the sink, using liquid soap to get the wash rag vaguely pink, and then returned to the stain in the making.

She was still moving, so he gently held her head still as he took a new damp cloth to drag it through her hair, and across on her face, to get her clean, to make sure that she was beautiful. Almost piously he washed the severely applied color from her lips, the dusty-stains from her tired, peaceful eyes, the liquid foundation that gave her a false glow of health.

Then Kate was still.

He whispered, over and over, "Mama, I take your sins and I damn my soul so that you may rest freely in Heaven. I forgive you, Mama. I forgive you." He wept for himself, Esau, the sinner who never committed a crime against God, and prayed for his mother's soul in Heaven.

"Jacob loves Mama," he said quietly into the darkness of the kitchen. "Jacob loves Mama."

* * *

**E**sau took to frequenting college campuses, oftentimes dropping in on a class to listen to teachers as they spoke on whichever subject he had chosen for that day. Never did he appear more than two or three times in any class, mostly because he was moving around so much that he would be gone by the time the fourth class rolled along. Esau picked up a myriad of information as if it were nothing but dust to gather. Mostly, though, he would stay after class and talk about the day's topic with a young woman, watching her and studying her, looking for the one.

Esau knew women. He knew how to charm them. He knew what they wanted, and how to play on their wants so that it seemed that they needed them. Once they were they under his spell, he could carefully give them what they wished for and be seen as the gracious young man. Esau would escort girls to their next class, smiling at them before giving them a flower and disappearing in the crowds.

They would ask his name, he would smile, and give a name to them that fitted his mood. In San Francisco he was Abraham, but confided in them that such a long name truly was not him and would they please, if they didn't mind, call him Bram? Pleased at being spoken to so honestly and so freely, the women would smile and draw closer to him, invite him home.

Esau always declined, though, because he was saving himself for the perfect woman, for the one that would define his life. He gave excuses, ones that they found both oddly attractive and sadly repelling at the same time. He knew that because of the way their eyes would flash in half-mirth, half-question when he explained that he was supposed to drive down and pick up his mother at the airport at eleven, she was visiting for the week.

It always struck him as strange that people had such strained relationships with their mothers, especially men. He had always assumed that no matter what there was on the surface, if one could dig deep enough there would always be an underlying current of love, both for and from the mother. Even he, as soon as he found how much he was like Jacob, came to find how much he and his mother loved each other. Why, in some ways, Esau reasoned, he was Jacob, more than just in birthright.

In Seattle, however, he was Rubel.

He sat in a criminal profiling class. He found that most young women in that class were very passionate about it. They would talk on and on about whatever subject matter had been discussed, dissecting it and painting it in their own way. These women would be the most careful when they spoke to him, he had found out. They would be charged with the adrenaline of what they had learned and be doubly on alert. The women would learn forward almost menacingly and whisper out statistics on rape victims and serial killers like it was a sort of pick-up line.

Esau preferred these type, because once they calmed down, had some ice cream with him in a shop or walked along the lake's shore, they would be the most earnest in their own personality. They would have the most to say about other things that interested them, not just the class, and he could discover the type of person they were without prodding too deeply with his questions. They were easy and yet so very difficult.

Esau's life changed irrevocably the day he met her. She was standing just outside an animal shelter with a small cat in her arms, looking positively lost in the beginning rain. Her hair whipped around her head from beneath her hat like the skirts of Mexican folk dancers. He stepped up to her and offered her his umbrella.

"Hello," he said, not expecting at all to find the woman he had been looking for in all his travels. She turned two almond eyes to him and, biting her lip in embarrassment, looked up at the hand that was holding the cover over them. "Where're you going with that fine fellow?"

She laughed merrily, scaring the cat, who dug his claws into her sweater and tried to burrow in from the neck. "I parked my car about two blocks down the street. I didn't expect it to rain."

"And how long have you been living in Seattle?"

"Really, the forecast mentioned a clear day!"

"Again, I repeat, how long have you lived in Seattle?"

"Okay," she said shyly, "you caught me: I'm new to the city. Why don't ya show me around this fair town of yours?"

"I would," Esau said, "but I'm a recent immigrant myself." He stuck out his free hand and she took it awkwardly, balancing the cat with the other. "Rubel."

"Rachel," she offered.

"Now, see, we've got an alliteration thing going on. I think we need some ice cream to celebrate that."

"Ice cream?" It was said doubtfully, amused.

"Yes."

"In this weather?"

"What other sort do you find in Seattle this time of year?" he asked teasingly. "Come, I know the best place just across the street. We may even wait out the rain, if you're skittish about a strange man walking you to your car."

"Well, if I meet any strange men, I'm sure I'm going to have to take that under advice. But I think I'll be okay as long as you're here to protect me from any unwanted suitors. Or, ya know, wanted suitors, because sometimes they look okay, but then there's this whole non-okayness that comes out in the middle of the conversation that really makes you regret your thinking he was okay in the first place. You're gonna protect me, right? Or am I gonna hafta beat them off with this umbrella? Which, actually, would fall into the category of your protecting me, as the umbrella does belong to you."

Esau smiled.

"I think I can lend my umbrella to such a good cause."

"I'm glad."

"Me too."

They ate chocolate ice cream together before walking to her car. He confessed he was only in Seattle on a lark, trying to decided where to live. She confessed she was a transfer student looking at Washington State. He whimsically said he'd follow her to whichever college she wished. They laughed and parted.

And met again. And again. Soon, she was all that he could think about. He searched the classifieds and, for the first time since he was a teenaged boy, he found himself an apartment to live in, not merely a hotel room where the breakfast rolls always tasted stale and the cold coffee burned the lining of his stomach like acid.

Rachel came over and listened to records with him in his empty living room and laughed at the number of boxes he didn't have. He silenced her laughter with a kiss, their first kiss, and he couldn't stop himself from running his hands through her dark black hair. They broke off, and he stared into her brown eyes for moments that passed like years.

She was the sun and the moon and the flowers in early spring and life, and most of all, she was purity in the form of a woman-child with blazingly green eyes that could catch the snow on fire if they so desired. She was, as Lord Byron said, walking in beauty.

"Do you like the stars?"

"I love the stars. I think they're gorgeous. It's like somebody took your eyes, gathered the dust from them, and placed them in the sky. Not as pretty by far, but they do quite nicely for those who can't stare into your eyes."

"Stop it, you're making me blush with your pretty words."

"They're not merely pretty words. They are the truth. I never say anything that I don't believe one hundred percent. Right now, right here, I think you are the most wonderful creature that was ever created."

"Do you know any constellations? I used to know some as a young girl, but I've forgotten many. I know Orion's Belt. Do you know Orion's Belt? It's, like, those three stars. I've always thought of Orion as a very small man in a large uniform. Sort of like a football player. Do you watch football?"

"I like the '49ers."

"The Niners are cool. I like what they have. I like college football a lot, though. I think that's where all the really awesome people are. The ones that are just about to be discovered. Their entire lives are looming large ahead of them and they have nothing to look back at and think they could have done better at. They are just kids, like us. Ya know?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?" Shyly.

"Yeah. Just like us."

"Except a lot bigger."

"A lot lot."

"Yeah."

There was something so perfect, so pure, about her that he could not contain his love. It spilled out of his eyes like children rushing to parents after a long day of school. Esau's voice would dance when he uttered her name. Rachel herself was no less in love than he. And, one night, they professed that love to each other.

"Ya know, Rube," she started, "what we have here could be love."

"I think you might be right, Rach."

And that was that.

The night he decided he was going to give himself to her was planned over very carefully. The music selection was a grouping of her favorite records. He went out and bought an inordinate amount of candles, because he remembered someone saying that women liked candles. He made her dinner, never burning a thing. It was perfect.

And leading her into the bedroom, his eyes brimming with love, he whispered her name over and over again. Undressing her, he couldn't keep his lips from forming the two syllables. Ra-chel. Ra-chel. Ra-chel. And in the very act of love itself, her name was said from a deep place within himself.

The noises she made were sensual but otherwise indescribable and he tried to figure out what he had done so that he could replicate those sounds. They reached his ears and sank into his soul, knitting themselves there as if they'd been a part of the fabric all along. The wordless syllables raced and ran through him and he had to ... just ... be ...

And there were pillows and clouds and something so good, so wonderful, that he could not ever hate the act of sex again. He kissed her nose and touched his forehead to hers, then settled himself onto his side, watching her. She leaned over, stretching luxuriously in the glow of it all, and smiled.

"You," she whispered, "are the best lover I've ever had."

It was like a knife.

There was cold slicing through his flesh so deeply it tore into his heart, ripping it to shreds. Esau's breath quickened, he reached over, touched the skin on her throat. It did not feel the same, did not feel like silk, but felt like rough cotton, plain, wrong against his fingers. He leaned over, pressing his entire body to her, crushing her into the bed, furious. She had betrayed him. He brought both his hands to her neck and squeezed.

Her face flashed in and out of focus and for a few moments he was convinced he was laying, naked, on top of his mother. His grip tightened.

Rachel quivered underneath him like she had just done only minutes beforehand and he could not help but touch her lips, her breasts, gently, reverently. Already her lips were turning purple, spreading across her face in a lighter blue that reached her red eyes and screamed. For a moment, he felt as though he should scream, should voice his displeasure, but instead he merely touched his lips to hers softly, waiting. On her shoulder, where he had roughly shoved it against the wall, he could see twin bruises, one from his hand, one from the wall, and he leaned over to kiss them, to nudge them with his nose, feel her satin-like skin on him. She had stopped fighting some time ago, but he held her firmly still.

Jacob wept over the body and prayed for the soul of the poor girl who could not help but be a sinner.

The Lord still loved him. Esau would earn the love as Jacob. Esau would fall into the cracks; Jacob would become known for his never ending loves. For even as he cleaned the sin off of his hands and cleaned the death of his mother and his love off his soul, he knew that he was earning God's love and doing the right thing. And he knew it was the least he could do.

He wandered slowly out of the room, nameless, and stared at the blue sky with a wry smile on his face, content.

THE END

**Esau I Have Hated can also be translated into 'Esau I Have Loved Less' meaning that he was loved, but that Jacob got more of the love**.


End file.
